The Significance of Dreams in a Dream Deprived Society

Oppression in art, as in
life, is when the conclusion to be reached is predetermined by inner or outer a
priori motives of how life or art ought to be.

Robert Motherwell

Civilization has posed a difficult task for the dreamer.
Born into a society where dreams are of little or no social importance, the
dreamer is left with few ways to satisfy a very natural curiosity to learn what
the dream is saying. The result is a kind of emotional ecological loss to
society, one in which so valuable a resource has gone unappreciated. Some day
someone like Rachel Carson may come along to alert us to the price we are paying
for this neglect. The repair will depend on the honesty with which we can face
up to the general historical developments that have led up to this state of
affairs and the current sociocultural forces that perpetuate it.

I won't say much about the general factors. They are well
known to us all. Setting ourselves apart from nature our efforts have been
devoted to a mastery over nature, including our own human nature. In savaging
nature, we ourselves have become an endangered species, if not physically, then
in terms of our obvious failure to nurture and cherish every human being that
lands on this planet. Instead of facilitating a spirit of connectedness, without
which we cannot endure as a species, our rugged individualism has left the devil
to take the hindmost. Nationalism, having outlived its usefulness, now stands in
the way of repairing the fragmentation the human species has been subjected to
down through the ages. Our dreams and the concern they show for the state of our
connectedness to others and to ourselves can make no claim of importance in this
outworn scheme of things. They await a new day.

As individuals we cannot easily resolve any of these
general issues in the near future. We can, however, do more with regard to the
specific issues that make it difficult to open the closet door. There are a
number of hidden assumptions that perpetuate this difficulty. For the most part
they derive from the lingering influence of a mystique that has grown up about
dreams as a consequence of the foothold that classical psychoanalysis
established in this country in the thirties. With that came an ideology that
cast the dream in a light that all but made it forbidden territory to the
ordinary mortal. To undo this inhibitory impact we have to see it for what it is
and take what steps we can to bring forth a new and more felicitous vision of
the gift our dreaming psyche offers so freely.

Jung took the first step in this direction. The respect he
showed to the dream freed it from its regressive prison, got rid of its jailor
in the form of the censor, and made for its freer existence beyond the limiting
domain of wish fulfillment. It is Jung's vision of the dream rather than Freud's
that attracts the attention of the current generation of dream explorers. Erich
Fromm accorded the language of the dream its full due. In a clear break with the
way the dream was enmeshed in the Oedipus myth and other facets of Freudian
theory, he viewed the imaging mode of the dream as a unique and distinctively
human attribute that creatively reflected the psychological forces that impinge
on our lives. Although paving the way toward a broader usage of the dream
outside the framework of therapy, the steps necessary to implement that usage
was a task for a later generation of dream workers.

In sum, the mystique of dreams in the mind of the public
included the regressive view of the dream, the dream as the container of a
cauldron of id impulses that threaten to erupt unless properly censored, the
predominant role of wish fulfillment and sexuality, and finally, the need for
someone psychoanalytically trained to interpret the resulting symbolism along
tracks laid out by psychoanalytic theory. There have been major revisionist
theories in psychoanalysis over the years that have moved away from the
overarching role Freud attributed to instinctual drives and childhood wishes.
These new approaches continued, however, to foster the cult of the expert and
perpetuated the idea that formal therapy provided the only safe and effective
way for the dreamer to engage with the dream. To challenge the premises
underlying this mystique was to court danger. While theory may be helpful to a
clinician as a way of highlighting trends in the developing life history of the
patient, it can often be misused when it comes to dreams.

Viewing the metaphorical imagery in the framework of a
particular theoretical orientation tends to foster an a priori approach to the
imagery, the very thing Motherwell warns about.

The thrust of my professional endeavors for over three
decades has been to do what I can to dismantle this mystique. In concert with a
number of other workers I have addressed the general public concerning my
conviction that access to dreams should be made available to all and I have
suggested ways of approaching the task. The mystique I referred to is blind to
the basic premise of this approach, namely, that dreaming is a universal
phenomenon and should be universally accessible. It does not take into account
the natural curiosity we all have about our dreams, a curiosity that betrays our
intuitive sense that our dreams have something of importance to say to us. There
is an active resistance by many therapists to what they correctly see as an
attempt to deprofessionalize dream work. Having established a beachhead in the
minds of the public that it requires an expert to decipher the symbolism of
dreams, they have thus far been reluctant to forgo their privileged position.

If we were to project a utopian vision in which society
were to give full cognizance to the healing potential of our dreams, what steps
are within our power now to move toward that ideal? A first step would be to
bring dream work into the educational system, beginning at the grade school
level and making it an intrinsic part of the educational process at all levels.
A few adventurous souls have experimented with this in the lower grades with
encouraging results. I have had some experience with it at the high school level
and, despite the special problems adolescents have about revealing their inner
selves to their peers, I felt dream work was feasible and could be particularly
helpful during this critical phase of development. Richard Jones pioneered a
productive approach to dream work at the college level. In his book, The
Dream Poet, he describes his experience of integrating what he refers to as
"dream reflection" into a course on literature. As the students became familiar
with the unique and expressive metaphors they were creating in their dreams,
they not only responded more deeply to the classics they were reading, but their
own writing became more original and more powerful than what might have been
expected from their grade level (second year students). Similar work has been
taken up at a number of different colleges. Edward Storm, a professor of
computer science, brought dream work into a beginning course in computer science
as a way of introducing students to the nonlinear analog attributes of dream
thought. Important as these efforts are, they were nowhere on a scale
commensurate with the educational potential that would accrue from an
integration of dream work into the college curriculum.

It is time for the dreamers of the world to unite and break
the theoretical chains that bind them to the cult of the expert and makes them
passive participants in maintaining the mystique. What are dreamers being
exhorted to do? First and foremost is to assume some responsibility to change
the situation. This will involve both a program of education and of action.

Basic dream work should and can be taught outside of any
particular theoretical frame of reference. I stress what I consider to be the
three important phenomenological features of dreaming consciousness, namely, the
relevance of its content to current issues in our lives, the retrieval of
information from the past that is emotionally linked to these current concerns
and finally, the profoundly honest way our feelings come through in the
imagistic narrative we compose.

The dream presents a dreamer with the opportunity to move
into the "becoming" aspect of his or her life. This entails certain unknowns and
will often challenge a pre-existing emotional status quo. A dream, arising out
of an unconscious domain, is now a challenge to the dreamer in the waking state.
We are dealing with a raw product created primarily to meet the needs of the
sleeping organism. A fish pulled out of the sea has to be cooked. A dream
surfacing in the waking state has to be worked on for its message to be brought
to life. For this the dreamer needs help in the form of a supportive and
stimulating social context. That help is needed in the translation of the
pictorial language and needs support in the owning of its content. Few of us can
be as consistently honest with ourselves in the waking state as we are when we
confront the imagery of the dream. Dream work flourishes in a group arrangement
where everyone, including the leader, participates in every aspect of the
process, including the sharing of dreams. A flat, nonhierarchical structure
results. This, in conjunction with the fact that the dreamer is respected as the
guardian of his or her unconscious and is the sole determinant of the level of
self-disclosure, generates the sense of trust essential to the pursuit of so
intimate and private an experience.

One way to approach understanding dreaming consciousness is
to consider the way it differs from waking consciousness in both the language or
form of the mode of communication and the nature of the content being
communicated. The form is strikingly different from our waking thoughts. We move
into a concrete sensory mode predominantly but not exclusively visual, and endow
the imagery with the metaphorical power to reflect the subjective aspects of
current concerns. We spend a good part of our sleeping time manufacturing visual
metaphors that tell us how we really feel about ourselves, about others and
about the immediate predicament we find ourselves in. If we are able to spark
across the metaphorical gap and retrieve this content while awake, we become
more truly in touch with ourselves. Our nighttime images are perceived as real
at the moment. Their metaphorical power comes to light only when we take the
time to explore their reference to our life. The waking discovery of the
relevant life experience completes the metaphor.

Let us look more closely at the language of the dream. Once
we free a dream from any extrinsic and superimposed theoretical considerations
we are free to examine that imagistic language in its pristine state. When we go
to sleep we shift from discursive speech to what I have referred to as
metaphorical imagery in motion. We adopt the persona of the poet in a way that
reflects the idiosyncratic emotional currents and express them not in words but
in images that are uniquely our own. Regardless of how uncreative we may
consider ourselves to be in our waking lives, the poet in each of us comes to
life when we are asleep and dreaming. Unlike the poet who rearranges words in
the search for the apt metaphor, we pictorially rearrange bits and pieces of our
past experience and cultural heritage. We create visual metaphors that speak so
precisely and so eloquently to whatever it is that we are feeling at the time.

The dream, in effect, is an aesthetic response to our
predicament. I do not mean to imply that a dream is a work of art despite the
fact that many dream images may be intrinsically beautiful and could become a
work of art were they to be transformed into one or another enduring medium of
expression. A work of art involves a good deal of energy and effort, sometimes
extending over periods of time before it comes together in any final form. By
way of contrast, the final product, the dream, appears spontaneously. No
self-consciously directed energies are involved. It appears as part of a natural
rhythm that occurs during sleep, a rhythm rooted in evolutionary processes. Once
the dream is made to reveal its secret, its own internal logic becomes obvious.
Then, and only then, can we appreciate how directly and precisely apropos it is
as a carrier of immediate felt concerns.

In using the term secret, I do not wish to imply that a
dream always has a secret to reveal. Sometimes it is quite transparent. There
are many instance when solutions to problems and inventive ideas appear in a
dream and are grasped immediately. More often than not the dreamer, on
awakening, has only a limited access to his or her own creation, and sometimes
none at all.. The greater our sense of metaphor, the more we might be able to
connect with the imagery. The difficulty does not lie in the metaphorical
language per se but, rather, in what that language is saying. Awake, we are not
always as prone to the same level of honesty as we are while dreaming. As actors
in the social scene, our unconscious defenses take over in the interest of
maintaining our social persona. While awake, expediency often replaces candor in
our efforts to protect a self-image. We have ways of not seeing what we don't
wish to see. While dreaming we see what is really there to be seen.

The REM or rapid eye-movement stage of sleep and the
associated episodes of dreaming are anything but a phylogenetic atrophic remnant
like the appendix. By exposing predicaments arising defensively out of
expediency or simply out of ignorance, this unique form of consciousness sounds
a clear moral tone. Were we to take seriously the need to learn how to close the
gap between image and reality we could benefit from the truth being exposed.
Dreams are an ally in the effort to extend our range of moral freedom in the
choices we are called upon to make.

Here I have to turn to moral philosophy for help. The point
of view I have found most congenial in sorting out the issues involved is that
of Mary Midgley. If I read her correctly, she buttresses common sense (it is in
our nature to want to be more moral than otherwise) with Darwin's theory of
evolution. She rejects any fatalistic view of human nature and links freedom to
morality but not in any idealistic sense. Moral choice is contextual and linked
to the specific circumstances and constraints in which that choice arises. The
important point is that the choice is always there whether we know it or not.
The constraints arise out of our individual life history and endure to the
extent they are reinforced by existing social and institutional arrangements.

I am, in effect, postulating that we all possess an
incorruptible core of being that makes its presence felt while dreaming, more
dependably than while awake. I have referred to it as an ethical aperture,
likening it to the aperture of a camera which opens more widely in the dark
(asleep and dreaming). The aperture itself cannot ensure a good picture, but if
properly set it allows for the best possible picture to emerge given the
circumstances under which the picture is taken. Analogously our dream enables us
to discern more clearly the circumstances involved and degree of freedom we have
in making a moral choice. The dream aperture automatically sets itself to
provide the information needed to ferret out the most moral choice available. It
is up to us to develop the picture and do the work necessary to become conscious
of that choice. The dream itself cannot make us do it. Our dreams are not
enforcers.

Dreams have a range that takes into account the fact that
the individual is a point of concentration of a complicated array of social
forces, many of which operate outside of awareness. Just as personal referents
in the dream reflect issues unique to the dreamer, social referents reflect
issues that remain unsolved in a given society. Racism, sexism, ageism and other
isms are still with us. Swept under the rug, they find their way into our
dreams.

In the following example a blatantly sexist childhood casts
a long shadow:

A woman in her late thirties is about to embark on a new
relationship. She feels some hesitancy and has a dream that displays some of the
roots of her ambivalence. At one point in the dream she sees her father sitting
on a swing with four female relatives, all in their heyday, dressed almost like
cancan girls. What emerged from the dream work were two powerful memories that
surfaced from her childhood to influence her approach to a new relationship. One
was that of the male, derived from the image of her father, as privileged to
flirt and play around with other women. The other was that of the female
victimized by the profligate male, as her mother was. These are images that she
is still struggling with. In a larger sense they relate to the residues of
sexism. The privileged male and the victimized female are still available social
stereotypes.

In the next example the dreamer identifies with the victims
of racism in her own struggle against sexism. A very experienced and competent
manager, her voice is rarely heard by the men above her.

Irma is a 50 year old white woman who presented a dream,
the key features of which were that she was with a group of children and an
African-American mother on a bus in which she tried out one of the seats in the
back. A little boy was speaking to a man. His black mother was angry because she
didn't want her black boy speaking with a white man who would be a bad
influence.

Irma's thoughts centered around her identification with the
strong black mother. Her recent relevant day residues arose out of events at her
work place. She is in a middle management position. "Those above me have all the
arrogance of 'the old boys club'".

Women were second class citizens in her childhood home,
controlled by a very dominant father whose strict religious teachings drew a
very sharp line between right and wrong. That line was more favorable to her
brothers than to her.

In my workplace I felt like the
underdog. If I `speak up' maybe I will eventually learn that a strong voice will
not always be perceived by men as aggressive. Being born 'black' I had to have
the ability to contain myself and still struggle to maintain my self respect and
respect for my ideas. I have felt an affinity to black women all my life.

The deeply felt mesh of the personal and the social was
laid bare by the image of her taking a seat in the back of the bus. A current
issue at work led back to her life long struggle to free her intelligence and
spirit from the limiting structure of her family life as set down by her father.
Her growing self-confidence enabled her to take a step that not only upset a
given status quo, but led to her resignation and a successful venture on her
own.

The identification of the social referents in their
specific relevance to a recent issue at work makes the connection between the
social and the personal explicit and reciprocal. The connection becomes
reciprocal when insight into the social scene sets in motion the hope of coping
with her own disenfranchisement. In her ruminations about the dream in the week
after she presented it, she felt the plight of the African-American woman on the
bus was a "parable for my entire life experience, oppressed as it was by the
strict regime my father and his religious beliefs imposed on me."

Irma's final comment was about her identification with the
black woman.

I like the idea that came up
that I was born a black woman. It goes beyond the events of the past week. It
goes back to my relationship with my father.

To the extent we remain unaware of the power of such
internalized prejudices, our moral freedom is compromised. Any threat to moral
freedom is ultimately a threat to enduring and collaborative ties among the
constituents of a given order. We are members of a species that has survived
thus far by virtue of our social attributes. If those attributes continue to
deteriorate and we fail to reverse the moral morass growing so alarmingly at a
community, national and international level, we are in for a difficult time in
ever unifying the human species.

Our dreams thus serve a dual purpose. Their personal
referents speak to the emotional baggage we carry around from our childhood. The
social referents speak to the way certain social arrangements and institutions
constrain our lives. One of the pitfalls common to industrial societies is the
tendency to reduce human beings to objects, the personal attributes of which are
useful in the marketplace. In the wake of recent examples of corporate
psychopathy, workers thrown out of work come to the sudden realization they are
no more than disposable objects.

In the following example, this "objectifying" trend is
played out in the sexual life of a young woman:

When a woman dreams of a reference to her sexual organs as
a head of lettuce encased in the empty shell of a cantaloupe sitting on the
shelf of a supermarket she is saying something about her own personal sexual
problem (frigidity) and, at the same time, making a statement about an aspect of
social life. The personal referents arouse our interest, but the social
referents are generally not pursued to any great degree. Briefly, the personal
referents are:

1. Sexual organs are seen as separate from her functioning self.

2. Sexual organs are seen as objects.

3. The object is made of completely closed leaves encased in a shell.

4. The objects can be bought and sold.

5. There is an anonymity to objects on the shelf of a supermarket.

The real-life situation to which this symbolism alludes may
be noted as follows:

1. Involvement in a situation of incipient sexual activity that occurred
apart from her own will and intent and at the instigation of her husband.

2. Reactions of irritation, guilt, and constraint.

3. A resolution through pseudo-acquiescence and preparatory sexual
activity involving the use of a diaphragm.

The
social referents may be similarly noted:

1. We live in a society where the capacities of people are sometimes
treated as objects divorced from the person: labor, brains, beauty, talent, sex.

2. These separated capacities are bought and sold.

3. The exchange value and laws of the marketplace tend to make the
transaction automatic and impersonal.

4. There exists in the nature of the external referents a detachment or
separation of the individual from the commodity she is called upon to use. Her
real relation to the commodity is determined by its manifest elements — the
object exists as something apart from herself which may or may not be purchased.

Our own humanity thrives best in an atmosphere of
affectionate and cooperative ties to others. Dreams provide us with an
opportunity to explore, understand and change whatever may be in the way of
establishing such ties. In this respect I believe our dreaming consciousness
goes beyond a concern for the individual and arises out of a more basic concern,
namely, the survival of the species. One of the unfortunate byproducts of the
historical evolution of human society is the enormous fragmentation that has
occurred among members of the human species and the terrible tensions that have
been associated with this fragmentation. We need only mention, as examples,
religious, racial, sexual and economic class distinctions, in addition to
accidents of geographical separation and differentials in cultural evolution.

While as individuals we may concern ourselves very little
with the integrity of our connections with others, pursue an unsavory way of
life, run roughshod over others and still live to a ripe old age, it is becoming
more and more unlikely that we will survive as a species unless we can get our
act together and learn how to surmount the historical fragmentation that has
occurred. Dreams can provide us with one more tool in the struggle to repair and
maintain that sense of species-connectedness so essential for our survival.

What is needed at present is a drastic revision of our view
of the importance of our dream life. Dreams are very low in the list of social
priorities. We do not introduce dream work into the family or educational
system. As adults we are left to our own devices to satisfy our natural
curiosity about our dreams. The only socially sanctioned arrangement for dream
work is the therapeutic situation where we pay someone to help us with our
dreams. All of us are dreamers and not all of us need therapy. Where can the
rest of us go? Dream dictionaries? They are more often misleading than helpful.

The knowledge and skills necessary for effective and safe
dream work can be identified and taught to anyone with sufficient interest.
There is a growing awareness that this is so and that the time has come to open
the door to the lay public. Were dream work to be socially upgraded and the
proper arrangements made for extending it into the community we would not only
provide the individual with a vehicle for personal growth but we might also
catch a glimpse of the underside of our own social order and its emotional
impact on each of our lives.

Cultural anthropologists have looked at dreams as mirroring
aspects of primitive societies. We have hardly begun to scrutinize the influence
of our own social order on our dreams. Were we to do so, I believe that
interesting relationships would emerge. In preliterate societies today, for
example, there is a niche for dreams as an important intermediary between
cultural, religious, and historical influences on everyday life. In antiquity,
notably classical Greece, this interest in dreams was also noted. In both
instances, there was a certain symmetry between the personal and the social that
served a unifying, cohesive function. The situation began to change in ancient
Rome as monotheism took over. The link was finally severed in western Europe in
the middle ages with the occurrence of two historical developments, the
invention of the printing press and the consolidation of the power of the
Church. The first made dream books, mostly oriented to mantic practices and
divination, available to the laity. The second resulted in disparaging even to
the point of proscribing the circulation of such books. In the eyes of the
Church, mystical visions and dreams were linked.

Both could be the work of either divine or satanic
influences. Since the laity could fall prey to the latter, it was felt that
dreams and visions should remain under the domain of the Church as the only
power that could vouch for authentic divine influences. This concern with the
vulnerability of the laity to demonic influences ultimately led to the
persecution of witches.

The Industrial Revolution marginalized dreams. It was the
last blow to any hope that our dream life would find its own natural haven in
society. Objective mastery of the external world far outstripped any realistic
social investment in the subjective mastery of ourselves. Dreams had no
significant social valence. With Freud the universal phenomenon of dreaming
found a limited place for itself in a profession dedicated to the art of
psychological healing. The public was left to shift for itself with regard to
their dreams. Universal accessibility to something so insistently a part of
everyone's life has remained a mirage for all but a handful of oneirophiles. In
the laboratory we have learned how to deprive people of dreams by keeping them
awake from the onset to the end of the successive stages of the dreaming cycle.
Without giving it a second thought, we have managed to live out our lives in a
dream-deprived society.

The closing decades of the last century witnessed the
appearance of a truly new phenomenon, namely, people gravitating toward dream
groups led both by professionals, including a scattering of psychoanalytically
trained therapists, and laity. While at this point these groups are only barely
visible dots on the landscape, there is every indication that this movement will
grow. That growth will depend on how safe and effective these groups turn out to
be. Currently, there are more people seeking such groups than there are groups
to accommodate them.

Every member of our species is a dreamer. If dream work had
a higher social valence than it now enjoys, might it, in the way it addresses
the micro-level of individual relatedness, make a contribution toward remedying
relatedness within the family and the community? Once dreaming consciousness is
more generally recognized as constructively complementary to waking
consciousness, and were that complementarity ever to gain a foothold in the
public domain, it just might open up one more pathway to a more humane social
order. There have been and still are societies that have integrated dream work
into their culture.

In sum, our dreams, when consciously pursued, are a kind of
emotional connective tissue bonding us as social animals. If we take the trouble
to permit those nocturnal visitations to find their place in our waking world,
they can provide us with a starting point in the continuing struggle to
transcend our limitations. The nature of our interdependence is such that, as
personal connections evolve more solidly, there are effects that reverberate
upward toward ever larger social units. Dreams can point us in the right
direction. They reveal our strengths, acknowledge our weaknesses, expose our
deceits, and liberate our creativity. They deserve far greater attention than
they now receive. As a psychiatrist, my concern is with personal truth. One road
I have taken in pursuit of this has been to attempt to demystify dreams in a way
that would make the personal honesty embedded in the metaphorical images of our
dreams available to all. There should be universal access to the benefits that
can accrue from them.

For too long the public has been taken in by the prevailing
mystique that serious dream work had best be limited to the clinical domain. Our
dreaming psyche arises out of an incorruptible core that, in contrast to our
waking ego, has never lost sight of the fact that we are members of a single
species. Our ability to endure as a species may depend on taking that fact more
seriously than we have in the past. Dreams reveal the state of connectedness of
the individual to his or her past, to others, and to the supports and
constraints of the social order. Is it too much to hope that, as we move into a
postindustrial society, the intrinsic honesty of dreams can be harnessed to this
effort?

We are in need of a politics of connectedness. The growing
interest in the healing potential of our dream life holds out the hope we may
eventually reach the goal of matching our biological unity as a species with a
cultural reality of communion and brotherhood. My point is not that dreams will
save us from ultimate disaster but they can, if taken seriously, be one among
many countervailing efforts.